Tencent Teaches AI to Edit and de-blur Photos Better and Faster

Tencent Teaches AI to Edit and de-blur Photos Better and Faster

Chinese Tech giant Tencent has unveiled two breakthrough artificial intelligence (AI) systems for manipulating images. one removes blurriness of images using large-scale de-blurring datasets and other called “face editor” which adds, removes or changes the age, mood, facial hair, or a number of other facial features of an individual in an image.

Tencent’s two AI project’s white papers of the de-blurring tool and the face editor tool were accepted for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) 2018 Conference, which will be held in Utah from June 18-22.

De-blurring Tool

Blurry images have been a long problem which results in a distorted and out-of-focus image. But Tencent’s de-blurring tool powered by AI is a faster, easier, and more powerful tool that user may find really handy if they are prone to clicking blurry photos.

In a paper titled the “Scale-recurrent Network for Deep Image Deblurring,” Tencent claims that they can produce better results qualitatively and quantitatively as their solution has a simpler network, smaller number of parameters, and is easier to train than previous learning-based approaches.

Because of its simpler structure and a smaller number of parameters, the researchers can evaluate the method on large-scale deblurring datasets with complex motion.

Face Editing Tool

The other, more complex Tool is AI “face editor” which can modify the facial features of an individual just by adding or removing features. In order to create better and better images, humans have become capable of manipulating photographs using programs such as Photoshop for years. But this AI-powered “face editor tool” is so far an interesting tool as it provides an end-to-end solution to almost any kind of face editing.

Another similar technology has led to the creation of complex generative adversarial networks (GANs) which require a colossal amount of data, but Tencent’s AI enable Face editor is lighter and uses an encoder and decoder system that could, potentially, function completely locally. Or we can say, this AI could allow it to function in cameras or apps only.